CBP Commissioner Robert Bonner acknowledged in a television interview Monday that the Border Patrol is 'almost ... being overwhelmed' by illegal immigration. The Border Patrol caught about 1.1 million illegal immigrants in fiscal 2004, but an estimated 10 million illegal aliens are in the country.

'This is like a sinking ship with a hole in it. You've got to plug the hole. You've got to stop the illegal migration into the United States,' Bonner said on C-SPAN's Washington Journal.

'If you don't do that ... you're just bailing water out of a sinking ship,' he added. 'So the very first thing we have to do is to gain control of our borders. The next thing we need to do is ... identify and remove people who are illegally residing in the United States.'

Notice that Mr. Bonner has conceded that the US has lost control of its borders. Mr. Bonner's warning represents an dire plea in the face of the Bush administrations continued refusal to address the worsening border situation. The establishment of the Minutemen Project, an independent group of US citizens so concerned about the collapse of the US-Mexico border that they are willing to patrol the border themselves, indicates just how seriously American anti-illegal immigration sentiment has grown. Mr. Bonner, however, frowns on the Minutement Project, even though its early effects seem to be a temporary diminishment of illegal crossings in the area of its patrols.

'We think it's probably better, all things considered, to leave the enforcement of the law to law enforcement professionals, like the Border Patrol,' Bonner said. 'And we certainly do not encourage people to take the law into their own hands, and we would deplore any kind of vigilantism.'

Vigilantism? Mr. Bonner has just admitted that his agency cannot do its job. The sheer numbers of illegal immigrants inside the US (11 million, according to a recent estimate) proves that the Border Patrol Agency is a farce. The Bush administration has proposed amnesty as its best idea for dealing with illegal immigration - i.e. a concession that it has no plans to deal with the millions already here and a recognition that it hasn't the slightest intention of securing the US-Mexico border. Mr. Bonner wants border patrol left to the "professionals" even as he admits that the "professionals" aren't doing the job. Perhaps if Mr. Bonner and his superiors in Washington (President Bush and the US Congress) were doing their jobs the Minutemen Project wouldn't be necessary.